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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Character Concept 1: La Sangrienta

Woo, posting.So this little thing started to take form in my mind while I was trying to work on a completely different fictional universe. Maybe if I get it out here it'll stop bugging me. Probably not.

Meet person X (the name needs work), a doctor who, after a lot of hesitation, performs euthanasia on a patient for the first time. Right after he dies, she experiences a weird rush of energy and shortly after, she realises she can now read minds, and manipulate them to a certain extent. Over the next few weeks, she uses this power to help herself and others, improve her life, hide the fact she killed someone, and general do-goodery and more or less innocuous self-benefit. Until she realises the power is fading. She has a vague feel of the amount of power she has left, tied to the rush she felt when she killed her patient, and it's not much. And then, another patient appears, she reads his mind, and finds out he's a rapist. There's much internal monologuing and self doubt, but she ends up killing him, and after a similar rush, her power is back in full strength.

At this point, she finally knows that the way to recharge her psychic abilities is to kill people. Through some experimenting, and because she can sense how much energy she has left, she figures out a few rules. Each kill gives her about a month's charge, and they stack up indefinitely, so for example killing someone today and someone in a week gives her a total of two months, not one month and a week. Killing three people today gives her three months without having to kill. Etc.

So she's obviously morally troubled by this. The right thing to do would be to give up her power because the cost is too high, right? Killing people is always bad, right? Except, she's already killed twice, and doubt as she might, she can't categorically say either was wrong. So that's her way out of the dilemma. She'll kill people that want, or deserve to die. And thus, La Sangrienta (The Bloody One) is born.

La Sangrienta is a serial killer/vigilante, who focuses exclusively on what she sees as the crap of society. Rapists, child molesters, murderers, other serial killers, corrupt politicians, eventually the Pope. (Are my biases showing? Yes, I thought so). She's constantly reading the minds of everyone around her, finds people who fit her target, follows them, kills them (usually in manner befitting her name, because I like blood and so does she), and leaves a note detailing the victim's crime.

At first, it's a once per month thing, only to stay psychic. Then, she starts to buy more and more into her own rationalizations, and starts killing more often. At some point, she's basically killing someone once a week, partly as a sort of "retirement fund" she's saving for when she can't kill anymore, partly because she becomes increasingly convinced that she's doing the right thing.Of course the police are somewhat baffled, and very humiliated as the legend spreads of the psychopath who not only outsmarts the police in that they can't catch her, but also in that she keeps finding the motherfuckers they missed. In fact, about all that they know about her is what she leaves in her notes.

This is not the kind of character you can have as a straight up hero, for obvious reasons. She works better as an anti-hero or anti-villain. Or regular villain, in a more black-and-white world. But I hate those, and this is my character so nyeh.

If I could draw worth crap, I would so be turning this into a webcomic. Shit, this was kinda counter-productive.

A small note on the title: you could argue that Identity was the first character concept I posted here, but it was more of an intro to the pseudo-philosophising of the follow up. Plus it's kinda silly to name something "X 2" if there was nothing named "X" or "X 1" before. Plus nobody read that.